How Did We Get Here: The Key to Managing Employees with Non-Traditional Backgrounds

The first thing I want you to know is that I’m the manager of an OSINT Engineering Team. I have the honor of leading 6 other brilliant minds through the creation, documentation, and daily execution of a never before done OSINT Harvesting Process. Over the last year and a half alone we have successfully parameterized 23 domains and have collected over 2,000,000 data points. We have first-hand experience of what it means to work with OSINT and the number of challenges and benefits it brings. And we are constantly pushing to refine this process in hopes of unlocking its potential.
The second thing I want you to know is that every single person on my team, me included, come from a nontraditional, non cyber background.

So how did we get here?

The answer is training and culture. Daily meaningful engagement that focuses on four main elements:

1. Real on the job learning
2. People First Culture
3. Open and intentional communication
4. Constant refinement

The reality is, having a non cyber background does not have to be a deterrent to working in the Cybersecurity industry. If we as managers and leaders are willing to rethink how we approach training our teams, we will find ourselves with homegrown experts who are truly masters at what they do. These four elements have been my approach to training over the last two years and they have allowed our department to go above and beyond, and I am confident you can do the same.